What to look for ...

PIMs

PIMs (personal information managers) can help you organize your life and, if you’re in business, make sure that you don’t let a crucial appointment slip through the cracks. They’ll keep important details about your contacts, including when you should follow up with a potential customer or check up on existing clients to ensure that they’re still satisfied with your products or services.

The first step in purchasing a PIM is to determine your own needs. PIMs come in three varieties:

• If you need an address manager or telephone directory, you’ll probably be satisfied with one of several products devoted solely to this purpose. Metz Phones, for example, can track names, addresses and phone numbers, then lets you add notes about each contact. It does not, however, schedule appointments.

• If you want to manage names and appointments, think about a true-blue personal information manager. Products such as Starfish Software’s Sidekick or Baseline Data Systems’ Office Accelerator combine both contact information and appointments.

• If you manage a sales process, you may be happiest with a contact manager. Products in this category include GoldMine, ACT and WinSales; they distinguish themselves by helping you manage a sales cycle. For instance, with WinSales you can define a cycle to include four or five steps (send brochure, write a follow-up letter three days later, call customer after a week, etc.) and then add the customer to a sales cycle--all the necessary appointments and tasks are added at once. GoldMine is particularly suited to salespeople who can evaluate opportunity costs, spotting the best contacts to keep in touch with (based on likelihood of a sale) when time is limited.

Once you’ve decided on the type of program you need, it’s time to go shopping. Here are some of the features you should look for. Remember, PIMs are as individual as your customers and the information you store about them. No single PIM is perfect for everyone.

• How well-integrated are the calendar and contact manager? Can you connect the two so that displaying a contact name shows all related appointments (including history)? Can you view your appointment schedule, then click on an appointment to see the related contact info?

• Can you customize the program? Some programs have limited fields, and you may find, for example, that there is no field for your spouse’s name or birthdate. Other programs let you add as many fields as you want, or provide a number of "user defined fields" that allow you to enter custom information. Are the custom fields long enough to keep the information you want, or will you have to use lots of abbreviations? NetManage’s ECCO lets you view data in an outline view and has extensive drag-and-drop support. You can also capture information from other applications and copy it into ECCO using the program’s unique Shooter technology.

• How many of the basics does the program handle? How many phone numbers can you store? Can you store alternative addresses (work or home, for example)? How many e-mail address fields are there? (Many contacts have multiple addresses.)

• How flexible is the calendar? Can you divide the hourly interval into quarter- or half-hour segments? Does it spot conflicts, preventing you from booking two appointments at the same time? Does it support recurring appointments such as your weekly Monday-morning staff meeting?

• How sophisticated and fast is the search engine? Can you look for names and company names only, or can you search for information in the notes field to find out who you’ve played golf with in the past month?

• Consider how you are going to share information. You may want to look at PIMs that support networks. Other solutions are less complex: Now Software’s Now Up-to-Date, for instance, allows you to publish your schedule in HTML. It also lets others in your office using the same product view your schedule using a Web browser, then drag and drop information from your Web page onto their own copy of Now to update their schedule or contact information.

• What else can you manage? Baseline’s Office Accelerator and Janna Systems’ Janna Contact95 are good choices for managing your correspondence; they associate documents with contacts or appointments. Office Accelerator also integrates well with word processors, so you can use the OA address book to quickly insert names and addresses for single letters or mail-merge tasks.

• Finally, how does the program look? Is it cluttered with information, thus slowing the search for key facts? Is it brightly colored or dull gray? Does the calendar have several looks (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly) that closely resemble your current calendar?

  For more information and details on PIMs, check out our July Feature, Untangle Your Time.

PIMs Buyer's Guide

Interactive Buyer's Guide Home Page